Archive: Year: 2009

Are conservatives out-organizing progressives on Twitter, as a recent story on CNN reported? And does their seeming dominance matter? For online activists in America, these are hard questions to answer, not least because a) "organizing on Twitter" is still (and may always be) a very loose process; b) usage of popular hashtags like #tcot ("top conservatives on Twitter," launched November 28, 2008) or #p2 ("progressives 2.0, launched in response February 13, 2009") is an imperfect measure of strength; c) judging by top follower numbers, Twitter's audience appears to lean liberal (more on that in a separate post); and d) we're still figuring out what Twitter is, and isn't, good for in terms of political battles (i.e. it's clearly good for...

The news that American southerners are the most likely to question whether President Obama is actually a native-born citizen got a lot of attention last Friday, when a Research2000 survey on that question was released by DailyKos. Eleven percent of all Americans apparently do not believe Obama was born in the United States, but 23% of southerners (compared to roughly 5% of people from the other regions of the country) share that belief. I thought it would be interesting to see what various trend-culling tools might add to this picture. A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase "Obama birth certificate" are: 1. Louisiana 2. Mississippi 3. Colorado 4. Oklahoma 5. Alabama 6. Tennessee 7. Arkansas 8. Missouri 9....

Over the next two months, the Federal Communications Commission will be holding a series of open public workshops on various aspects of the emerging "National Broadband Plan," which it is mandated to deliver by the end of the year. The workshops cover everything from deployment of broadband services to how these new services may help improve health care, education, job training and the environment, and they are bound to be an important locus of ongoing debate as the powerful FCC gets reshaped under the Obama administration. Indeed, our very own Andrew Rasiej has been invited to participate in the first one, this coming August 6th on e-government and civic engagement. We think these workshops could be very enlightening, and appreciate that...

In case you haven't noticed, a few days ago we launched a new "vertical" here at Personal Democracy Forum: PdF Europe. The idea is to gather a community of voices reporting, analyzing and participating in the ways the internet is changing politics in across the Continent, and to build a gathering place online for all the people who are interested in this November's first-ever PdF Europe conference (Barcelona, Nov. 20-21). You can find posts by using the url...

Judging from Technorati's tracking of the use of the terms "obamacare" and "public option," the effort by Republican message-meisters and blogger-activists to frame the health care reform bill as a new version of "Hillarycare" (and thus defeat it) appears to be gaining traction, at least as a tag: Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords. obamacare vs. public option » Configure this widget for your site!...

There's something interesting going on over on Senator Arlen Specter's Facebook wall. Hundreds of people--many, if not all of them, constituents of the Pennsylvania Democrat (who was not long ago a Republican)--are posting short messages urging him to defend the Clean Air Act, which has been weakened in the House version of President Obama's pending climate legislation. Same with Senator Dianne Feinstein's and...

YouTube's new decision to make usage metrics publicly available give us a whole new trove of information to mine about how various political actors and messages are doing. This information--who’s watching your videos, geographic distribution, traffic flows and total views, ratings by users--has always been available to video publishers through YouTube's Insight tool. Now, if publishers choose to make that info public, we can see it too. Some examples of what you can find out: President Obama's special video message to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday, which has more than 600K views, was "most popular" in Iran: His policy speech announcing a "new strategy" for Afghanistan and Pakistan was very popular in Pakistan...

In case you missed it, or want to share it with friends and colleagues, here's digital ethnographer danah boyd's talk about race, class, and the disturbing signs of "digital white flight" among Americans online. She takes a close look at how young people seem to be self-segregating between Facebook and MySpace, and challenges to audience to look hard at how online social networks may be reproducing or intensifying social divisions in America. The text of danah's talk is up on her blog. Needless to say, it has generated a huge amount of intense discussion....

Here's the video of Michael Wesch's keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, first gained acclaim as the author of "The Machine is Us(ing) Us," a video about how the internet is changing society (that has been viewed more than 9 million times), and I was thrilled that we were able to get him to speak at PdF this year. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I note that Wesch's talk was clearly the favorite of conference goers--72% rated it among their top three presentations, and he got one of the two big standing ovations earned by conference keynoters. He artfully sketches a picture of modern...

It looks like Organizing for America, President Obama's de facto field organization based at the DNC, is ramping up its efforts to demonstrate support for health care reform. Last week I took a look at OFA's online directory of upcoming health care canvassing efforts, and found 561 events. Now the same search turns up 677 upcoming events across the country, a nominal increase at first glance--until you realize that the myBO database only shows upcoming actions, and many of the events listed in my search last week were for last weekend, and have thus expired. And states with likely Senate swing votes appear to be getting a lot of attention...